Perfect spelling, vocabulary, usage, grammar, punctuation and style do not necessarily correlate perfectly with intelligence and competence, but most people infer that they do. Thus perception is reality.

The UK requires that new citizens know English. It formally tests for competency.
EPA/Andy Rain
July 1, 2015

Within Australia, there has historically been a clear social distinction between Cultivated (British-oriented) and Broad or General, distinctly Australian ways of speaking.

Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka with a group of children in Lagos. Research suggests that literacy in a mother tongue is a building block for multilingualism.
Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters
May 14, 2015

Everyone knows that in the sentence “Jane is washing her”, the pronoun “her” cannot refer back to Jane. Over the last four decades, researchers have established that adults reject the interpretation of…

Being able to communicate effectively in a foreign language is a challenge faced by many of us. If you’re a newcomer to a country, conveying a message in a language that is not your mother tongue is often…

The education of children who speak more than one language is being used as part of a wider debate about immigration just months before the UK’s 2015 general election. But there is surprisingly little…

American-speak is pervading the English language. But is it actually American?
Flickr/Okay Yarramanoglu
October 19, 2014

From time to time, Australians complain about the apparent encroachment of Americanisms in our language, and the Brits seem none too happy about it either. George Bernard Shaw famously said: England and…

It’s not just English class that matters.
Money Sharma/EPA
September 30, 2014

With a joint population of 1.6 billion, the South Asian countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are home to nearly one quarter of the world’s population. It is the most…

An hour of homework or an hour of World of Warcraft? It’s not hard to guess what many ten-year-old boys would rather be doing when they get home from school. But now research shows that in non-English…

A new report from the think-tank Demos is calling for a new national strategy for the way we teach English to migrants in the UK. Its researchers point to 850,000 people in the most recent census who said…

Listicle: an article made up of lists. This may be regarded as [Bare](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/bare#bare21) lazy as it obviates the need for coherent paragraphs, or as Douchebaggery…

It’s not often that grammar makes the news, but there’s currently a good natured spat going on between Melvyn Bragg and John Humphrys. Bragg hosts a long running BBC Radio discussion show called In Our…

Sticklers beware. The British Library is hosting it’s English Grammar Day, a day to finely split hairs over split infinitives, apostrophe’s (sic, sic, sic), and Oxford commas (sick!). Yes, in the case…